WASHINGTON – The federal Bureau of Prisons is permanently closing its “rape club” women’s prison in California and will idle six facilities in a sweeping realignment after years of abuse, decay and mismanagement, The Associated Press has learned.
The agency informed employees and Congress on Thursday that it plans to shutter the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California, and to deactivate minimum-security prison camps in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. Staff and inmates are being moved to other facilities, the agency said.
In a document obtained by the AP, the Bureau of Prisons said it was taking “decisive and strategic action” to address “significant challenges, including a critical staffing shortage, crumbling infrastructure and limited budgetary resources.”
The agency said it is not downsizing and is committed to finding positions for every affected employee.
The closures are a striking coda to the Biden administration’s stewardship of the Justice Department’s biggest agency. After repeatedly promising to reform FCI Dublin and other troubled facilities, Bureau of Prisons Director Colette Peters is pivoting to closures and consolidation, citing inadequate staffing and staggering costs to repair aging infrastructure.
The permanent shutdown of FCI Dublin seven months after a temporary closure in the wake of staff-on-inmate abuse that led to the “rape club” moniker is the clearest sign yet that the agency – which has more than 30,000 employees, 158,000 inmates and an annual budget of about $8 billion – is unable or unwilling to rehabilitate its most problematic institutions.
The move comes three years after the agency closed its troubled New York jail in Manhattan after myriad problems came to light in the wake of Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide there, including lax security, staffing shortages and squalid, unsafe conditions such as falling concrete and busted cells.
At the same time, the agency recently committed to building a new medium-security prison facility and minimum-security camp for about 1,400 inmates in Roxana, Kentucky, citing a need for “modern facilities and infrastructure,” with $500 million earmarked by Congress for construction.
The Bureau of Prisons and the correctional workers union have repeatedly pushed for additional federal prison funding, highlighting what they say is an inadequate amount of money to address pay increases, staff retention and a multibillion-dollar repair backlog. More than half of federal prison facilities were built before 1991 and many are becoming outmoded or obsolete, the agency said.
The agency said it expects that reassigning employees to remaining facilities will boost retention and cut down on mandatory overtime and augmentation, a practice by which cooks, teachers, nurses and other prison workers are assigned to guard inmates.
In a document summarizing the closures, the Bureau of Prisons said it decided to close FCI Dublin after a security and infrastructure assessment following its temporary closure in April. At the time, it appeared the agency was set on closing the low-security prison, but officials held out the possibility that it could be repaired and reopened for a different purpose, such as housing male inmates.
The assessment identified considerable repairs necessary to reopen the FCI Dublin, the agency said.
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